Burnout, resilience, and cardiometabolic phenotype in an academic medical faculty: an integrated cross-sectional assessment from the United Arab Emirates.
Agha A, Pathan J, et al. • Frontiers in endocrinology • 2026
Cardiometabolic risk and burnout were both common and overlapped along specific dimensions rather than uniformly, with emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation tracking measurable liver phenotype in an academic medical faculty cohort in the UAE.
Key Findings
Results
Any-dimension burnout affected 61.3% of the academic medical faculty cohort.
65 of 106 faculty members met criteria for any-dimension burnout under 4th-edition MBI criteria.
Burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey for Medical Personnel (MBI-HSS-MP).
The MBI-complete analytic cohort numbered 106 participants with a median age of 43.0 years and 50.9% men.
The cohort was enrolled during a 1-week screening camp in November 2025 at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University.
Results
Emotional exhaustion was independently associated with liver stiffness measurement (LSM) after adjustment for age, sex, BMI, and glycated haemoglobin.
β = 0.061 kPa per MBI emotional exhaustion point (95% CI 0.022 to 0.100; P = 0.002).
Adjustment covariates included age, sex, body mass index, and glycated haemoglobin for liver outcomes.
LSM was measured via transient elastography (FibroScan).
102 of 110 enrolled participants underwent FibroScan testing.
Results
Depersonalisation was independently associated with both liver stiffness measurement and controlled attenuation parameter (CAP) after adjustment.
Association with LSM: β = 0.106 kPa per MBI depersonalisation point (95% CI 0.025 to 0.187; P = 0.011).
Association with CAP: β = 2.43 dB/m per MBI depersonalisation point (95% CI 0.51 to 4.35; P = 0.014).
CAP measures hepatic steatosis and LSM measures liver fibrosis/stiffness via transient elastography.
Both associations were adjusted for age, sex, BMI, and glycated haemoglobin.
Results
Resilience was inversely correlated with emotional exhaustion and positively correlated with personal accomplishment.
Resilience and emotional exhaustion: Spearman's ρ = -0.27, P = 0.006.
Resilience and personal accomplishment: Spearman's ρ = 0.31, P = 0.001.
Resilience was assessed using the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10).
These correlations suggest resilience may buffer against burnout dimensions but was not uniformly protective across all cardiometabolic outcomes.
Results
The cohort demonstrated a broad and high burden of cardiometabolic risk factors.
Elevated triglyceride-glucose index in 51.5% of participants; elevated atherogenic index of plasma in 24.3%.
High lipoprotein(a) ≥125 nmol/L in 17.5% of participants.
Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) detected in 55.9% of the 102 FibroScan-tested participants.
Results
The overlap between burnout and cardiometabolic risk was dimension-specific rather than uniform across all burnout dimensions.
Emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, but not personal accomplishment, were the burnout dimensions associated with measurable liver phenotype.
Associations were detected specifically with hepatic outcomes (LSM and CAP) rather than with blood pressure, lipid indices, or carotid intima-media thickness.
Common carotid intima-media thickness assessment and Framingham 10-year risk computation were performed but did not show significant burnout associations as reported.
The study used Mann-Whitney U tests for group differences, Spearman's ρ for correlations, and linear or logistic regression for adjusted associations.
Conclusions
The study recommends that routine cardiometabolic and hepatic phenotyping should accompany dimension-specific burnout screening in faculty wellness pathways across the Gulf.
This recommendation is based on the co-clustering of burnout dimensions (emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation) with liver stiffness and steatosis measures.
The Gulf academic medical faculty cardiometabolic risk profile had not been previously characterised in any published Gulf cohort.
The study followed STROBE reporting guidelines and enrolled 110 faculty members total.
Screening was conducted during a single 1-week camp, limiting longitudinal inference.
What This Means
This research suggests that academic doctors and health sciences faculty in the United Arab Emirates face a double burden: high rates of both occupational burnout and cardiometabolic health problems. In a group of 110 faculty members screened in a single week, more than 6 in 10 showed signs of burnout in at least one dimension, while more than half had evidence of fatty liver disease, about a quarter were obese, and many had elevated blood sugar, blood pressure, or unhealthy lipid profiles. These findings highlight that this professional group carries substantial hidden health risks that may go undetected without systematic screening.
Critically, this research suggests that two specific aspects of burnout—emotional exhaustion (feeling emotionally drained by work) and depersonalisation (feeling detached or cynical about patients)—were independently linked to measurable signs of liver damage and fat accumulation in the liver, even after accounting for age, sex, body weight, and blood sugar levels. This connection between psychological stress dimensions and liver health outcomes is a notable finding that points toward potential biological pathways linking chronic workplace stress to organ-level changes. Higher resilience scores were also associated with lower emotional exhaustion and higher sense of personal accomplishment at work.
This research suggests that wellness programs for medical faculty, particularly in the Gulf region, should go beyond mental health surveys and include objective physical health checks such as liver scans and cardiometabolic blood tests. Addressing burnout in its specific dimensions—rather than treating it as a single condition—may be important for understanding which faculty members are at greatest physical health risk. Because this was a cross-sectional study (a one-time snapshot), it cannot prove that burnout causes liver disease or vice versa, and future longitudinal research is needed to understand the direction of these relationships.
Agha A, Pathan J, Anwar E, Eltayeb H, Elseed M, Ali A, et al.. (2026). Burnout, resilience, and cardiometabolic phenotype in an academic medical faculty: an integrated cross-sectional assessment from the United Arab Emirates.. Frontiers in endocrinology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2026.1913703